Contact information stored in communication terminals such as mobile phones includes personal information of owners owning the communication terminals and personal information of information providers. The information providers are persons who provide information such as phone numbers to the terminal owners.
FIG. 1 illustrates an example of the personal information of the information providers included in the contact information. Names indicate the names (identifiers: IDs) of the information providers, and phone numbers and mail addresses are contacts indicating the communication terminals owned by the information providers and are associated with the names of the information providers. For example, a phone number of a user A is “71XXXX”, and a mail address of the user A is “X@fffff”. The personal information of the information providers may include addresses, birthdays, and the like. The personal information of the terminal owners includes information similar to the personal information of the information providers.
In communication terminals that are smartphones, tablets, and the like and have appeared on the market in recent years, application programs allow to use application programming interfaces (APIs) for acquisition of contact information or the like to acquire contact information instead of directly referencing the contact information within the communication terminals. Hereinafter, application programs are merely referred to as applications in some cases. In addition, functions that are achieved by causing a computer or the like to execute application programs are referred to as applications in some cases.
Related techniques are disclosed in, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2014-98968, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2009-245145, and Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2002-232554.
Traditional applications that have the right of access to contact information may use personal information of all information providers that is included in the contact information, and a technique that allows the information providers to control whether or not the personal information thereof is to be used is not known.
The aforementioned problem is not limited to mobile communication terminals such as mobile phones, smartphones, or tablets and occurs to other communication terminals such as personal computers.